 Geo 2.0 trendwatcher Tanguy De Lestre |
How the review was triggeredGeo-trend-watcher Tanguy DE LESTRE invited us to write an update about RouteYou and the evolution since the last time he presented our story on www.geo20.eu monitoring Geography2.0 in Europe (check out his presentation here).Since you are all involved, I imagined that you might like to read this story too and have already a peak review in advance! Tanguy DE LESTRE will present the story on GEO 2.0 on the 13th of October 2010 in Gisotopolis event in Brussels. |
 We launched the website of RouteYou from this building in Gentbrugge, 3 and a half years ago |
Getting to more than 370 000 visits per monthWe launched the website www.routeyou.com in december 2006. We started with about 4000 visits per month in the beginning of 2007 and 40 000 visits/month at the end of that year. Last year we had our peak in august with 310.000 visits/month and this year we surpassed that peak already with 370.000 visits/month in May. We had our 6 million-th visitor in spring. |
 The link between a silverback and qualitative routes? Read all about it here. |
When a community puts its shoulder under someting...The RouteYou prosumers create a great set of data and provide a great set of information on the web. Just to give you a few figures. At the start, we were very happy that we could provide 500 routes which were created by ourselves. Now, there are more than a quarter of a million routes available on the site created by the RouteYou community. Ofcourse, these routes have a varying quality. So we invested a lot in software to automatically detect that quality and push the good stuff to the top and the bad stuff to the bottom (read more about the quality of the routes here). We also calculate the author score to be able to classify his or her work (read more about it here). Besides the community users, we have a lot of professional and semi-professional organisations and authors providing their qualitative recreative routes on RouteYou and share it here and on their own websites. |
 The user-community helps out to classify and order routes and identify characterisitcs of the road and path network |
The prosumers help outUsers can classify (tag) their routes in several groups, to identify the kind of route, the characteristics,... There are about 50 general groups (themes and characteristics) we created. Typical examples of characteristics are: partly unpaved, paved, race-bike suitable, MTB suitable, dog-friendly,...). The better they are classified, the better the score of the route is,...Users can also create groups to share there specific set of routes with friends and club members. There are more than 4500 groups created by users sharing their information, events and news about their specific activity (read more about groups here). |
 Specific map products for you GPS |
GPS is not just used anymore to go from A to BAll this kind of information is a huge source for the update of the RouteYou network (read more about it here). We provide the users routing functionality on this network for free on the website of RouteYou (so everybody is better off). And we integrate the information in the commercial products for GPS systems. The community input provides us a unique source of information about out-door navigation. Ofcourse, you can't integrate the info one to one, but it provides an extra source of input to improve our products (where is it nice to cycle, where are the interesting things to see, what are race-bike suiteble roads,...). We integrade the info in our GPS map products you find on the market for e.g. Garmin (e.g. walking maps, cycling maps, recrational motor-cruising maps...). |
 RouteYou plugins
are showing the RouteYou content in more than 35 000 webpages outside
RouteYou (read
here more how to make use of this too)
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RouteYou is not just a website, its a web-networkWe also provided plugins so users can share the data directly on their blog or website with their blog or website vistors.There are about 35 000 webpages where this info is plugged in (outsite the RouteYou website!). That provided an extra 2.5 million visits or exposures of the RouteYou functionality. |
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Get surprised by info from othersSince the beginning of last year, we also provided a better link between routes and interesting locations. Users can create interesting locations or add their info to an existing location. But users can also request (push) interesting locations along the route they planned.We developed an algorithm to mark and push the most interesting POIs along your route. And if you know a better one which is not yet available, you can just add it to the site. There are now already 430 000 locations and 126.000 specific texts telling a story about these locations. We set up collaborations with partners to provide events in the neighbourhood of your route (Oxynade). But also interesting hotels (booking.com), restaurants (resto.be and lekkerindebuurt.be), bicycle friendly hotels (Toerisme Vlaanderen), Motorbike Friendly hotels (Bikehotel,...). This extra functionality is a great service to our customers and an interestign businessmodel to receive revenu. |
 RaceYou, one of the iPhone applications created with a partner from RouteYou |
Professional customers and partnersBesides the functionality on the website, we provide a lot of this functionality to professional partners. Let me name a few: Bicycle planners (more specific knooppunteplanners) for Toerisme Oost-Vlaanderen, Toerisme Limburg (Knooppunteplanner), Twente, Salland, Vechtdal, Arnhem-Nijmegen,... Walking and cycling planners for Fietsactief.nl, Fietsenwandelweb.nl, Kortenberg,... Also professional organisations such as newspapers (Het Nieuwsblad, Het Belang van Limburg, Gazet van Antwerpen), magazines and specialized websites (www.motor.nl), tourist organizations (FranceGuide.nl),... plugged in on overview of the availabe routes on RouteYou to offer to their customers and tap into the community.The web goes mobile, but you knew that already...And it is not news anymore that the web goes mobile. So is RouteYou. We set up a collaboration with several partners to create applications using the data and functionality of RouteYou on Smartphones. Geolives and RaceYou are just two examples of many to come.If you would like to find out more about RouteYou, check out this link. Or, stay tuned on this website. |